Requiem [COMPLETED]

Fuck, I Hate When Shit Gets Serious

Thank you brother dear for yet another elegant title. (eye rolling)

I ended up not having much time to write a proposal. Grandma was sick. Sven had gone to visit her and the nursing home said she'd been sent to the hospital. He found her in the ICU for severe pneumonia. Sven had been visiting her much more frequently than me. I feel guilty about that, all that time I wasted when I could have gotten to know her better and maybe learn more, but I was too angry with her at the time. Sven didn't understand. He was always so eager for her approval, I don't know why. Maybe because she favored me, even though I was cold to her at times. She still insisted that her mother was part of me, since I was apparently her doppelganger.

Sven went almost every day to visit her while she was in the hospital. Her pneumonia had been concurrent with a dramatic change in mood that left her grumpy and pessimistic. Sven tried to cheer her up but she didn't want to be. He even brought David with one time, to try and comfort her. She had decided it was her time to die, or rather that she should have already died and was living unnecessarily long due to God's neglect.

"I told God he's a damned procrastinator," she muttered. "I've been through enough. I'm done. I don't want to hang around for forever when there's nothing to look forward to. I've seen too much already. Isn't it enough?"

Sven was torn by grandma's insistent despair and determination to meet her maker. He was upset by her proclamation that she 'had nothing left to live for. Her life had already been lived and done for some time.' He wanted her to want to be there with him while he held her hand and shared himself with her, one story at a time. And it wasn't that she didn't love him; it was more that she was tired and overwhelmed and worn down.

Real human beings have real emotions; not the nicely edited and politically correct versions we see in idealized family movies. Authentic, off-the-cuff emotions aren't very pretty. Sven and I know; we unleashed them upon each other often enough. They are wild, feral things that seem to sense and aim for the weaknesses in other people, like demons that spring from our mouth ready for the kill. They are trouble to those who are shanghaied by what springs out from within them just as much as those who are faced with such wild beasts unexpectedly. I could see that Sven was wounded by her indifference sometimes to his love but he tried not to show it.

In her old age she had started to regress; she didn't always remember him. One time she'd caressed his face and held it, and kept calling him "her sweet Sven," and cried when he left. He thought then that he must resemble his uncle, for she had never been so physically affectionate before. It saddened him, but it gave him a modicum of comfort to know yet another small fact proving he belonged to these people who were not just grandpa, that there were other options less painful.

Life was not kind to grandma, and this was mostly what she remembered as the doctors fought to prolong her life and rid her of the disease she hoped would result in her exit. When they told her that she could soon be moved back to the nursing home, it was as if they had sent her to sit in the corner like a bad child. She pouted and snarled and refused to eat. They sent her back anyway. They were all against her, working to increase her torment, she told Sven. "They won't let me be. They want me to live forever because they know I want to die. I'm too old for this." She started crying. "I'm too old for this. Haven't I been through enough? Why can't they just leave me alone?"

Sven tried to comfort her, but she snatched her hand away. "You're not my son," she gasped. "Who are you? Nurse! Nurse!"

The more distant and forgetful she became, the more tender and apologetic Sven became towards her, as if he could nurse her mind back like the doctors could her body. I realized when I was older that this was one of his most defining traits: he so badly wanted to fix things for people he loved, but it never seemed to work out. He had a bad habit of picking battles that couldn't be won.